Still, given the economic situation, those two divisions were okay, yet the company’s bottom line wasn’t. I’d brought the last annual report with me; I dug it out and compared the last year-end figures with the accounts I had on my computer screen, then did some simple calculations in my head. A healthy profit had been reported for the previous year, but I was looking at a future projection of break-even at best, and a chunky loss at worst. The company’s year-end was September; just about the time when Susie’s illness was diagnosed. She’d been more affected by it than she’d admitted in our conversations, but there was more to it than that. Someone beneath her in the group’s hierarchy hadn’t been doing his job. I went back into the management accounts and spotted the devil in the detail at once. Construction of private housing and commercial stock had stopped; there were a few high-value houses left unsold but they weren’t suicidal. No, it was that damn golf course that was the money pit. Over the previous six months, twenty million pounds had been transferred to the subsidiary company that was executing the venue. Without that, the business would have been far healthier, and obviously its indebtedness would have been that much smaller.
Liam came out of the bedroom as I was looking at the figures. ‘Do me a favour, lover,’ I asked him. ‘Give Tom a call and ask him to get along here now, if he’s ready, and to bring his iPad with him.’
‘Sure.’ He noted what I was doing. ‘Trouble at mill?’
‘I hope not.’
Rather than call, he walked along the corridor, and returned a couple of minutes later, with my son, who was dressed more like himself, in pirate pants and a T-shirt that he’d blagged from a friend of ours in the village, who combines running a restaurant with a music career. Monoceros, his alter ego, might not have been a household name in Glasgow, but my son was doing his bit to change that. I was pleased that he seemed completely relaxed in Liam’s company, and that they were chatting like a couple of old mates.
‘When we get back to St Martí, Mum,’ he said, ‘Liam and I are going to do yoga on the beach in the morning. You can come too, if you like.’
‘Maybe I’ll just watch,’ I replied. Liam and I had been too busy with other things to discuss what was going to happen when we did return home. I was taking nothing for granted. Our three days and one night together had been great, but I was making no assumptions … of either of us.
‘What do you want me to do with this?’ Tom asked, holding up his tablet.
‘Can you log on to the BBC website and find out what the Gantry Group share price is doing?’
‘Sure, but I can log on to the Stock Exchange as well. That would be quicker. Susie Mum showed me how last time I was in Monaco.’
‘Then do it, please,’ I asked. It was something I should have done the day before; I’d been asleep at the wheel … or maybe the previous day’s events had simply overwhelmed me a little.
He nodded and set to work, with a certainty in every step he took and every page he called up. ‘The share price fell by twenty-eight per cent yesterday,’ he announced, after only a couple of minutes, ‘and it’s fallen by another twelve per cent this morning.’
I looked at Liam. ‘A forty per cent drop,’ I exclaimed. ‘On the basis of what I’ve been looking at here it’s been overvalued lately, but by nothing like that much. That needs investigating.’ I picked up the annual report and looked through the list of the company’s professional advisers: auditors, solicitors, stockbrokers, all blue chip, and last of all, financial public relations, a consultancy called Groynes deVelt.
There were contact details for each one; I called the PR people, knowing that if they were any good at all they’d be open during stock exchange hours and beyond. They were; I was answered almost instantly, by an androgynous voice, youngish and pronouncing the firm’s name very carefully in a voice that made me wonder if Mick Jagger had sent one of his many kids out on work experience.
‘My name is Primavera Blackstone,’ I told him/her. ‘I’m the new chair of the Gantry Group PLC and I’d like to speak to the person who handles our affairs.’
‘Mmmm, let me see, mmm, that would be Cressida Oldham. I’ll see if she’s available.’
As I waited, patiently, there was a knock at the door. Tom opened it and admitted the room service waiter with breakfast for three on a tray, thanked him and bunged him a couple of coins that I hoped were sterling and not euro.
‘Mrs Blackstone,’ a decidedly female voice boomed into my ear. ‘Cress Oldham here. Look, I hope you don’t mind, but since we don’t know each other would you mind answering a standard verification question?’
‘Depends what it is.’
‘Your mother’s maiden name?’
I told her and she relaxed. ‘How can I help you?’
‘You can give me some insight into the company’s share price. It’s heading groundwards like a skydiver in lead boots. What the hell’s going on?’
‘Well …’ she began, giving the impression that she was struggling to come up with a good answer, ‘… Ms Gantry was a strong and prominent company chair, highly regarded by the City. It’s quite natural that the share price should have fallen as a reaction to her death. I have to say it might have been wiser to prepare the market for it.’
‘As in Susie releasing a statement,’ I retorted, ‘that her street-smart twelve-year-old daughter might have read, announcing that she was terminally ill? That sort of preparation?’
‘Well,’ she conceded, ‘maybe not.’
‘In any event, Ms Oldham,’ I continued, ‘forty per cent is a hell of a strong reaction.’
‘Yes, but … Can I be blunt?’
‘As blunt as you like. The way I see it, advice only comes in two categories, good and bad. Sugar-coating always leads to the latter, so don’t do that with me.’
‘Okay. First, the analysts don’t know you; you don’t have a track record with them. So when you suddenly pop up as the last act of a dying woman, they’re likely to see you as a desperation gambit, someone chosen in haste because there was nobody of quality available.’
‘I was chosen in haste,’ I conceded, ‘but Susie could just as easily have appointed someone from the board. She anticipated market reaction; a small initial fall, but nothing to worry about.’
‘Yes, but then she died.’
‘And three or four per cent suddenly became forty? I might be a novice, but I’m not a fool. There are other factors involved. I want to know what they are. I might have been appointed as non-exec chair, but as you say, Susie’s death changes things. I’m forced to be hands on, to protect the shareholders, one of whom is my own son. So trust me, Cress, if you don’t spill everything you know and I find out you’ve held back on me, your firm will be history as far as the Gantry Group is concerned.’
The guys were watching me. Liam was smiling; Tom was looking as if he’d never seen me before, as I laid it on the line for the PR lady.
My message was absorbed. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ve been told by a couple of analysts I spoke to in the fifteen or so minutes before you called that someone’s been briefing against you. They’re saying that you have a criminal conviction for deception, and that you’ve been in prison.’
‘That’s true,’ I admitted, ‘but it was a long time ago and it had nothing to do with any sort of business activity, as Susie Gantry was well aware. You can brief in return that I’m happy to talk to anyone about it and to give them a Nigella-style critique on the standard of catering in HMP Cornton Vale. And you can add, as robustly, and publicly, as you like that anyone who suggests that it makes me an unfit person to hold the chair of a public company will be hit so hard by the ensuing writ that they will be knocked flat on their back. Now please get that message out there, and put a stop to this selling stampede.’